In the United States alone there are more than 4.5 million hotel rooms available to travelers. Currently, these hotel rooms have an industry-wide occupancy rate of just over 60%, with the occupancy rates of various geographic areas and individual hotels varying wildly. This occupancy rate often drastically affects the bottom line of a hotel or hotel chain. To increase their occupancy rate, and thus their profitability, hotels make every attempt to please their guests in order to encourage them to return. In order to please their guests, and lure new ones, hotels have continuously added amenities, such as on-site spas, restaurants, fitness centers, and in-room coffee machines or mini-bars.
In addition to these additional amenities, hotels have adopted a variety of different check-in procedures to minimize the time required for a guest to check-in. These procedures include adopting electronic key cards as opposed to mechanical keys, which enhances guest security and allows the hotel to change to a new room key, alleviating the need for the guest to return the keys to the front desk at check-out. However, even these procedures still present a distracting delay to a hotel's most valuable customers, business travelers. To increase loyalty amongst these frequent travelers, among others, most major hotel chains have invested tremendous assets in developing rewards programs, such as the Hilton HHonors® Program. The goal of these programs is to allow hotel chains to better understand the needs of travelers and make their stay as streamlined as possible. For instance, some hotels provide express check-in for a select set of their guests, while others provide check-in/check-out over the Internet or via a computer kiosk located in the hotel lobby. While these advances have certainly increased the occupancy rates of the various major hotel chains, they have not yet solved the problem of fully automating the guest check-in/check-out process, thereby allowing a guest to arrive at their hotel and enter their room without any additional time-consuming steps.
Similarly, these issues can be found in a number of situations that require secured access into a building, facility, or designated area, such as for example airline gates, concert or other event gates, and public transportation gates. These structures can use wireless access points that can communicate with a user device having the required authentication to allow a user to enter the structure. These access points can use directional patch antennas that have associated back lobes that emit the signal in the opposite direction. When two patch antennas are placed proximate to one another, such as in a back-to-back orientation and face opposite directions, the near field signal strengths do not reliably indicate or differentiate between the two antennas due to the back lobes. For applications that require determining when user is inside or outside of a structure, this differentiation critical. Current methods of reducing back lobe radiation of patch antennas creates a highly focused directional antenna, meaning that the main lobe bandwidth is also reduced while the gain directly in front of the antenna increases.
This disclosure is applicable in all areas where customers are waiting in a queue for entrance or access to a structure, vehicle, venue, or any other type of restricted area. Additionally, this disclosure is applicable to various radio communications and short-range wireless communications that can be used for communicating between a device and an access point. There is a need to better shape the radiation emitted and limit back lobe radiation to better differentiate the location of a user.